]]>Seeing a cab driver or a corner store owner whip out a cell phone with a white Square reader on top is always a great reminder that even in our increasingly high-tech world, plenty of small, local businesses are just now entering the modern world of e-commerce. They might not be the easiest customers to acquire, but small businesses with heavy daily traffic can still be pretty untapped markets when it comes to implementing tech-oriented business products and strategies.

LocBox is a Bay-area startup announcing funding on Wednesday with the goal of bringing modern marketing practices to small businesses in service industries, making it easy for store owners and entrepreneurs to send updates via social media and manage brand pages across the web. Because when it comes to digital marketing, the divide exists as well. A software startup might have no problem navigating a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account, but a local hair salon owner might need more help.

LocBox, which launched about a year ago, raised a $5.1 Series A funding round a few months ago from InterWest Partners, Accel Partners, Google Ventures and 500 Startups, following a seed round they raised last year. Keval Desai, a partner with InterWest and former product director at Google and VP of product at Digg, will join LocBox’s Board of Directors. They also recieved funding from notable angel investors, like Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, founders of Kosmix (see disclosure below.)

LocBox, which has graduated pricing depending on the size and scope of the company, gives users a dashboard from which they can publish updates to feeds like Twitter or Facebook, send out mass emails and texts, and publish Groupon-esque daily deals with a simple payment platform. Mehta said the product already has good traction, and their customers number in the “low to mid-hundreds in terms of actual customers,” and they’ve run about 2,000 campaigns for those clients. Mehta said the new funding will be used to grow the business, which relies mainly on a sales staff to reach out to potential clients.

Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, co-founders of the social media startup Kosmix, have announced that they’re leaving WalmartLabs, where they led the San Bruno innovation and data arm of the massive public company.

As reported by Forbes, the two had been with the retail giant for about a year. They founded Kosmix in 2005, and it was acquired by Wal-Mart in 2011. The site provides a dashboard for users to aggregate social media and information about a particular topic, making it well-suited for Wal-Mart’s innovation lab focused on e-commerce. Their previous startup, Junglee, was purchased by Amazon in 1998 for $250 million.

At Walmart Labs, we’re building a big and fast data group to combine store data with social media data in some meaningful way. For example, a Wal-Mart buyer in Arkansas doesn’t know the optimal time to stock football merchandise in Wisconsin. That buyer can look to the social streams to see when people in that region are tweeting about football or their favorite teams. Monitoring social media can even help Wal-Mart find breakout products.